Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

In Queneau's mind elements of a text including seemingly trivial details such as the number of chapters were things that had to be predetermined perhaps calculated. He became a member of la Société Mathématique de France in 1948. Additionally he edited and publiRaymond Queneaud Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.